Human history is as much a product of forgetting as it is of remembering. What actually goes down in the pages of history can be unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary.
Listen to Beethoven’s famed Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47, commonly called the Kreutzer Sonata after the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. It is sometimes assumed that Beethoven originally dedicated the sonata to Kreutzer. In reality, Kreutzer never could perform the sonata.
Instead, he reportedly told Beethoven the piece was “impossible to play” — a notable complaint, given that Kreutzer was considered one of Europe’s top violinists at the time.
But it was not impossible. By this time, Afro-European violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower had already played the sonata, said Creative Writing Prof. Rita Dove, who recently wrote a book about the musician.
Bridgetower was a Mulatto violin virtuoso. His musical talent was so impressive that Beethoven originally wrote the piece for him, not Kreutzer, Dove said. Why, then, did Beethoven rededicate the sonata to Kreutzer, a violinist who refused to play it? Also, why did history subsequently forget George Polgreen Bridgetower?
Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, said she aims to recover Bridgetower’s lost significance in her latest book of poetry. “Sonata Mulattica” dramatizes in lyric verse the life of the violinist and the different factors that led him to historical obscurity rather than fame.
“I wanted to discover [Bridgetower], Dove said, “and poetry was the way I wanted to discover him.”
In a joint concert with Dave Matthews Band violinist Boyd Tinsley, Dove will celebrate the release of “Sonata Mulattica” Friday evening as part of the 15th Annual Virginia Festival of the Book. The blending of poetry, music and conversation will begin at 8 p.m. in the Paramount Theater.
“[When] Dove mentioned that Boyd Tinsley was cited in one of her poems ... we all agreed that it would be fantastic if there could be a joint program,” said Nancy Damon, program director of the Virginia Festival of the Book. Kevin McFadden, the festival’s associate director and a former University student, said he felt that there would be “large interest” in the program, and eventually the festival invited Dove and Tinsley to perform together at the Paramount. Dove used Tinsley’s name in her poem, “The Bridgetower,” describing him as one of today’s gifted people forgotten by time. She said she contacted him after finishing writing “Sonata Mulattica” to let him know he was featured in it.
Dove and Tinsley enjoyed working together on the upcoming event, Dove said. “He works similarly [as] I do ... on improvisation,” Dove said, adding that both are artists who experiment with their craft to expand its scope and range of expression. Combining the two crafts of poetry and violin music to share one message is in itself a chance for improvisation.
“It’s been a great process of getting to know one another,” Dove said of her collaboration with Tinsley, who, like Dove, is a Charlottesville resident. Dove added that Tinsley wants people to remember what happened between Beethoven and Bridgetower in 1803. Both Tinsley and her aim to “connect the dots from Bridgetower all the way up to Tinsley,” Dove said.
Damon said she anticipates that the event will be “a very exciting combination of words and music which fits perfectly into [the festival’s] goal of encouraging people to read.” She added that “with any success, the story contained in Dove’s book and Tinsley’s music — the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower — will encourage people to explore what they read more deeply, to examine the personal significance every story offers them.”
Dove said her initial decision to versify Bridgetower’s 200-year-old story happened largely by chance. As a former cellist, she heard Bridgetower’s name long ago but did not give it much thought. That changed years later when she glimpsed a portrayal of Bridgewater’s genius in the 1994 film, “Immortal Beloved.”
By the age of 10, Bridgewater, already a prodigy, was on the road performing.
“That was really interesting — a little boy, half-black and half-white, playing in concert halls across Europe,” she said.
As a young man, Bridgetower came to Vienna, where he impressed and befriended the already legendary Ludwig van Beethoven. The friendship, however, was short-lived.
“The Bridgetower,” which was printed last November in the New Yorker, explains why: In May 1803, Beethoven and his new friend first performed their new sonata together with the German on pianoforte and the Afro-European on violin. The performance moved the composer so deeply that he “leapt up to embrace his ‘lunatic mulatto,’ the playful nickname he had given Bridgetower.
“[But then they had a] falling out over a girl nobody remembers, nobody knows.”
Bridgetower apparently insulted a woman who was one of Beethoven’s acquaintances. In response, the composer chose to dedicate the sonata to another musician. The pair would never renew the friendship.
How might racial categorization both in and beyond classical music be different if Bridgetower’s fame had survived the first round of history’s cuts? How many more figures like Bridgetower might there be today if their names were better remembered? His own mulatto identity literally bridged African and European cultures, and his technical abilities surpassed even those of the famous Kreutzer. Beethoven’s sole reason for renouncing Bridgetower had nothing to do with music and everything to do with emotion. But because of a chance combination of factors, Bridgetower “has kind of dropped out of history,” Dove said. Remembered here and there, maybe, but more as an interesting detail than as anyone historically influential, she added.
For Dove, obscure stories like Bridgetower’s history point out the shortcomings of history and the need for something beyond it that can be used to remember human life.
Around every famous historical figure, there are countless other people — “living, breathing people,” Dove said — who were just as significant. Perhaps these nameless contributors would be the ones in history books instead if a few circumstances had worked out differently.
For those select few that history does remember, it seems to do so incompletely, which offers the world only small, scattered windows into past lives as vibrant as the ones that people are living now, Dove noted.
“What has always fascinated me [is] the realization that we all have interior lives,” Dove said. “What history does is to point out, rather graphically, just how little of that interiority can be passed down through generations.”
This is one of Dove’s main reasons for writing poetry, she said. She aims to acknowledge and explore that interiority with the intent to expose the personal, emotional side of history.
“History ... tells us what happened. It doesn’t tell us why it was worth it,” Dove said. “That’s the job of poetry.”
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